One of Jolene Hansons earliest memories is of eating birthday cake in a wheelchair at the University of Minnesota Medical Center in Fairview. It was 13 March 1976, her fourth birthday, and just 16 days after she was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL). In those days, ALL killed around two-thirds of the children it struck. Hanson remembers little about her treatment except that her mother crushed one of her drugs and put it in her ice-cream. But her medical records show she was taking metho-trexate, vincristine, doxorubicin, asparaginase, prednisone, cyclophosphamide and cytara-bine, and had 12 rounds of radiation to her developing brain.
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